Monday, August 24, 2015

A few days ago Medgar Evers rendezvoused with USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) in the Caribbean Sea.The hospital ship is working in those waters as part of Operation Continuing Promise, providing medical services and disaster assistance in a humanitarian demonstration of "Soft Power" that I for one can get behind!

Sunday, August 23, 2015

Yet another fantastic night of "Sidewalking" at the CrabShack! Arrived
at 2000 and logged 30 Members of the Public by 2200, at which time I
began to break down the 120mm. I just love to share the night sky with
people!

The big target of the night was the waxing gibbous moon;
conditions didn't allow for high-power views of Saturn. Maybe next
time!

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Just
in from a session of "Sidewalk Astronomy" at the 'CrabShack' seafood
restaurant and fishing pier. Set up my 120mm refractor at 2000 and
almost immediately was busy answering questions and sharing the views of
the Moon and Saturn with passersby.

My journal--which doubles
on these occasions as a guestbook--records forty-three signatures and
I'm pretty sure that several individuals and groups looked thru the
'scope without signing the book! Knocked-off and drove home at 2300 and
am now seriously considering bed even though the stars still shine
outside.

Thanks to all the folks who joined me tonight to enjoy
the skies, and a special thanks to the management and staff of the
'CrabShack'; their support of local amateur astronomy is much
appreciated!

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

AMAZING
night! I sat out on deck enjoying the view of the Milky Way (plus a
few bright meteors) from 2130 to 0115, when my eyes just couldn't stay
open anymore. No telescope, not even binoculars--just me and my camp
chair and a big insulated mug of tea, grokking the light fantastic.
It's hard to describe the sight of the starry night at sea; think of the
darkest night you've ever seen and make it darker, with so many dimmer
stars visible that it seems difficult to pick out the brighter ones that
form our constellations. Saturn was an amber beacon near the claws of
the Scorpion and the star-clouds of Scutum and Sagittarius looked like
actual CLOUDS in the sky!

Saturday, August 8, 2015

Imagine if you will a mountain far larger than Everest or K2. Now imagine that this mountain is made of ice;
ice with a leavening of stony debris and dust—gravel and particles of
fine grit. Color it the darkest shade of charcoal, with perhaps a slight
reddening, and then lift it into the sky. If your imagination can reach,
place it far from earth—out in the vast spaces beyond the planets, on a
curving path that takes it even farther from the faded Sun, a path that will
not return it to the warmth of the inner Solar System until the year 2125.

This is Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle*. Too far from the
heat and light-pressure of the Sun to display tail or even the dusty crown of coma,
109P tumbles through space on the outbound leg of its 133 year-long orbit,
naked, dark, invisible against the background stars. Darkened by
uncounted centuries of exposure to Sol’s ultraviolet radiation, it has
long-since been lost to sight by Earth-bound observers with even the greatest
of telescopes. Farther and farther from the warm center of our solar
neighborhood, Comet 109P journeys alone. But not forgotten.

Yesterday’s Comet

Comet Swift-Tuttle was probably observed by Chinese
astronomers in the first century BC, and certainly it has appeared many times
in our skies over the centuries, but it acquired its hyphenated name in July 1862,
when independently discovered by Lewis Swift and Horace Parnell Tuttle. It’s
orbit was calculated and soon researchers realized that this “hairy star”
had appeared in the heavens before.

Comet 109P is also part of my own history; in the early
1990s I was able to observe its passage through our skies with my portable telescope
and binoculars, and so I have a small but definite proprietary feeling
regarding this frozen visitor from afar. It is one of the dozens of
comets I have been fortunate enough to view over the forty+ years I’ve been
stargazing, beginning with Comet Kohoutek in the early 1970s.

I’ll never see the bloom of coma, the fan-shaped tail
of Swift-Tuttle again; my own journey through life is quite short when compared
to that of this lonely voyager. But I will see the orphaned children of
109P, and soon.

The Dusty Trail

Like all active comets, Swift-Tuttle leaves behind pieces of
itself as it travels its long orbital track around the Sun. In the heat
and pressure from our star the crust of the comet loses infinitesimal portions
of its mass; sublimation of its shell of ice from a solid to gaseous state
results in a slow dispersal of its solid mass along the portion of its orbit
that crosses the inner solar system, dust and ice particles slowly spreading
out along its track and following in the wake of the parent body with only the
tiniest of differences in velocity. Comet 109P has been pursuing nearly
the same orbit—with only occasional perturbations caused by the gravities
of planets passed along the way—that this slow process has spread the lost
mass along the entirety of Swift-Tuttle’s orbit.

Imagine this—not only is the 26-kilometer-across mass
of 109P continuing faithfully to follow this well-defined pathway around the
Sun, but that same pathway is also inhabited by the debris that the comet has
generated over the countless millennia! The individual orbits of the
billions upon billions of particles of dust and icy residue vary slightly, so
there is some spreading-out; some are lost forever through perturbation by the
giant planets, others simply wander away due to miniscule differences in momentum,
and many, many are channeled by gravitational variations into twisted ribbons
of matter, invisible streams of dust and ice. Unseen they rush through
space, in general following the orbit of their parent body. These
particles are known to science as Meteoroids.

Tonight’s Meteors

Comet Swift-Tuttle’s orbit is an ellipse that drives
deep into the solar neighborhood, and compared to the open vastness of the
outer system our warm central region, close to the Sun, is a crowded
superhighway of planets and asteroids; it is remotely possible that 109Ps orbit
will intersect that of one or more of these bodies at some point. And
when it does…

Now we come to the most wonderful co-incidence of our story;
the intersection of one of those ribbons of dust and ice—a meteoroid “stream”—with
a planet near and dear to us--Earth. For the past few weeks our world has
been driving deeper into the spread-out debris of Comet 109P, being struck by
more and more particles over recent nights, and as I write this we near the
central, most dense portion of Swift-Tuttles’ stream. Because of
the same effect of relative motion that makes snowflakes seem to streak toward
your windshield from a certain point in the distance, this stream of debris
appears to drive toward us from the direction of the constellation Perseus; for
this reason we call this collision of planet and meteoroid stream the “Perseid”
meteor shower.

When the particles of space debris dive into our planet’s
atmosphere they are known as “meteors”; striking the thin upper air
at incredibly high speeds they begin to slow, transferring their kinetic energy
they heat the surrounding molecules of gas to incandescence. This is the
bright streak you see—a “shooting star”. The Meteoroid
is not “burning up” as much as breaking-up; the increasing air
pressure overcomes the objects tensile strength as it shatters into smaller and
smaller pieces until—in most cases—only the finest dust remains to
sift through the lower atmosphere to the ground. The rare fragment that
makes it intact to the ground is known as a Meteorite.

The Sons of Perseus

The Perseids are one of the years’ most impressive and
reliable meteor showers—the “old faithful” of annual
celestial fireworks shows. Each year, beginning in the last week of July
and strengthening into the second week of August, the bombardment begins;
millions of tiny bits of matter striking our planet’s upper
atmosphere. Most are too faint for us to see; the vast majorities are
detectable only by the “hiss” of radio static to be heard on certain
frequencies. Many are seen as quick “shooting stars”, and a
tiny fraction—a few thousands—will light up the night sky and draw
appreciative gasps from all observers. To see a bright “fireball”,
drawing a green or yellow trail behind it, is one of the most sought-after
experiences of the meteor watcher.

The morning hours of August 13th (Thursday) are forecast to
be the critical time to observe the Perseids; from a dark location with a wide
view of the sky it may be possible to observe 50 to 80 meteors an hour after
midnight, and even before that time there should still be a pretty impressive display.
I’d like to invite you all to go out under the August skies and meet the
wayward children of Comet 109P Swift-Tuttle; they’ve come a very, very
long way.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

I've started a new project this weekend. Okay, I'll admit it...in reality I've been working on this one for several years, collecting the pieces and materials. But today...today I finally started construction on my own brass and silver Orrery, and I have to admit I'm pretty excited about that!

What is an Orrery? It's a model of the Solar System--the Sun and planets--that uses clockwork-type gearing to simulate the relative orbital motions of the major bodies around the Sun. They've been around for centuries (more on their history in a later post) and vary in complexity and accuracy, but they all function by displaying the Solar System in a mechanistic manner, miniature planets swinging around a tiny Sun.

Naturally, I am fascinated by such simulacra; I can remember that the first time I ever saw one (long ago at a planetarium in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) I stood rooted in front of the display for many minutes, absorbed in the motions of ball bearing-sized terrestrial worlds and marble-sized gas and ice giants. I remember thinking then that I would someday have such a machine of my own.

And now I do. Or, I should say, I shall, once I finish construction of the brass-and-silver beauty before me! I've waited forty years, so I plan to take my time on this project, and enjoy...

My Orrery kit is from Britain, where it was sold about six years ago as a "part-work". These are hobby kits published as part of a magazine (either via the news-agent or subscription), with a different part or group of them released each week during the year-long run of the magazine, for a total of fifty-two issues.

This publication, called "Build A Model Solar System", completed its run quite a few years back. The guiding principle of part-works magazines is to draw in subscribers or weekly purchasers by insisting that it would be impossible to acquire the magazines or parts if you missed an issue, and unfortunately they are pretty solid on this policy. So solid, in fact, that when I heard of this project it was far too late to jump on-board!

So...for the past six years I've been haunting EBay and other online emporia, scooping-up the part units and magazines when I can get them. Yes, a part-work that released the components for this Orrery over one year has taken better than half-a decade to catch up with, but a few weeks back I secured the final, missing piece to this rather complicated puzzle and, as mentioned above, the fun part--building it!--has begun.

I've completed the first two steps for construction of my Orrery, so as of now it looks rather naked. In fact, in my photo you can see the Sun (big brass ball) and two inner planets, Mercury and Venus.

Here is a link to the promotional video for the original part-work, just to give you an idea of what we're aiming for, here!

For Those Who Came In Late...

I'm a retired Navy veteran, currently sailing with the US Navy's Military Sealift Command as an Operations Chief. My dominant interests are science (esp. astronomy), history and photography. I'm an Atheist and Skeptic; I enjoy a good, reasoned debate but if things start getting hostile then I have better things to do than argue your particular strongly-held belief or conspiracy theory!